What's the point of Empyrean?

I'm playing my first game since BtS was released, which means it's my first game with many of the new features, such as world spells and corporations. After founding FoL with my Malakim and getting several sources of Sun mana (for no other reason than to see what I could do with it), I decided to switch to Empyrean. My national hero (Teutorix) gives a bonus vote on the Overcouncil, and the Empyrean national hero (Chalid Astrakein) also gives a bonus vote, as well as being pretty awesome in his own right.

So now I'm sitting with both Teutorix and Chalid, all my cities are Empyrean, and I'm wondering what's the big deal? It seems like all of the other religions, both early and late, provide a number of substantial and significantly different benefits. I'll leave out Council of Essus, as I don't know anything about them, but here are some of what the others provide:

Runes - Soldiers for production bonus, Arete, nice priests, 3(!) heroes
Faith of Leaves - Ancient Forests, Guardian of Nature, tiger-summoning priests
Octopus Overlords - Aquatic dominance, Tower of Complacency, Asylums
Ashen Veil - Awesome priests, Sacrifice the Weak, 3(!) heroes, numerous special buildings
Order - Crusaders, Social Order, basilicas

By contrast, Empyrean offers worthless priests (or at least extremely situational), a single hero, and the ability to cast Blindness from the Radiant Guard.

The hero is certainly strong, but there are other religious heroes who are just as strong, or stronger (Hemah, I'm looking at you!). The Overcouncil vote is kind of interesting, but it's rare that it will actually make a difference, whether because the council options aren't all that powerful, or because members are voting with you anyway, or because everyone else is against you.

Maybe if I was able to upgrade some Vicars to Luridus I'd be less tempted to say the Empyrean priesthood is entirely worthless. As it is, though, Incense is the rarest resource in the game (I only seem to have it 1 out of 3 games), and you can only have a few Luridus.

So, what am I missing? Notice that each of the other religions grants something that fundamentally changes your empire. Is there some key to Empyrean that I haven't discovered yet? For a religion that comes so late, I would think it might at least be competitive with the others.

Yea, I've been beelining Empy as the Elohim lately. I think the only real reason is that the other religions seem suited for specific races and thematically, I like Empy.

Since my civ doesn't start with sun mana, I can save a prophet so I can establish Dies Diei right away and get access to sun mana and Radiant guards. I usually have an archer and a radiant guard on defense in each city. You'd be surprised at how useful a radiant guard can be. In my last game, i had my army to the south and I got attacked by a northern neighbor. I had a couple radiant guards with mobility and used them to repeated blind the attacking stacks until my main army got back into town.

Also, with Corlindale being a str 0 unit, he'll get picked even over hawks and workers. The Dies Diei ability of revealing all hidden units in your lands helps quite a bit if you're up against the Khazad or Ljos who love to sneak their assassins in.

Chalid is also damn sweet. Combo caster / fighter (can't twincast though) that also has the pillar of fire. Luridus is also cool but I agree that Incense is sometimes hard to find. I had to conquer 2 civs to get to a source in my last game But basically, you can walk up to any city, cast pillar and maybe a crown of brilliance if you have a luridus and you've reduced everyone in the city to 20% strength.

PS Anyone know if crown continues to do damage after you cast it if it hasn't faded? I noticed that it says there's a 25% chance of it fading each turn, but I haven't been able to tell if it does another pulse of damage on the turns where it hasn't faded yet.

General concensus is that Chalid is the strongest religious hero. Hemah is good, but he's easily assasinated and his damage dealing potential is less than Chalid.

Chalid aside, Empyrean is mostly defensive and diplomatic in nature. As such it's the most useful peacemongering religion, or if you enjoy using diplomacy alot. There's a +6 diplomatic relations bonus for members of the Overcouncil.

It lets you maintain peace to pursue a builder strat, or manipulate Overcouncil members to fight with you.

That's why the religious units are not very strong and very defensive.

The Empyrean really needs to be changed to better fit its theme, imho. It should be a religion of diplomacy, peace, and enlightenment. In my version, Chalid looses his unique spell and Empyrean Temples increase the GPP rate but hurt military production. I had made it so that their high priests could be sacrificed for a golden age, but now I'm thinking I may instead let them use Corindale's Peace spell (or maybe a weaker version thereof, which doesn't effect the whole world). (I'm doubling the number of priest spells for all religions)

I'm thinking I'll change Revelation to be a pyPerTurn effect for the Vicars instead of a spell, but I'm not sure what spell to give them instead. Maybe something similar to Inspiration, creating a temporary building that provides a small happiness/health/GPP/research/war weariness increase?

EverNoob said:

General concensus is that Chalid is the strongest religious hero. Hemah is good, but he's easily assasinated and his damage dealing potential is less than Chalid.

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Even compared to Meshabber of Dis? Heck, Mardero is stronger unless you have 3 Sun mana lying around, and why would you? I agree the combination Chalid offers is hard to beat, but I don't think he's clearly the best.

Chalid aside, Empyrean is mostly defensive and diplomatic in nature. As such it's the most useful peacemongering religion, or if you enjoy using diplomacy alot. There's a +6 diplomatic relations bonus for members of the Overcouncil.

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I also agree that being on the Overcouncil is nice if you want to ally with the council members. That's not exclusive to followers of Empyrean, though. For example, in my current game there are four members of the Overcouncil. 3 of them follow Order, and I follow Empyrean. I could just as easily be on the council if I had stuck with Faith of Leaves, or any other non-evil religion, for that matter.

It lets you maintain peace to pursue a builder strat, or manipulate Overcouncil members to fight with you.

That's why the religious units are not very strong and very defensive.

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I just don't see much that's special about Empyrean. Chalid (admittedly very strong) is about it. There's stuff that is sort of thematically related, but nothing that makes me think "Oooh, so that's what I can do with it."

fuzzy_bunnies said:

Yea, I've been beelining Empy as the Elohim lately. I think the only real reason is that the other religions seem suited for specific races and thematically, I like Empy.

Since my civ doesn't start with sun mana, I can save a prophet so I can establish Dies Diei right away and get access to sun mana and Radiant guards. I usually have an archer and a radiant guard on defense in each city. You'd be surprised at how useful a radiant guard can be. In my last game, i had my army to the south and I got attacked by a northern neighbor. I had a couple radiant guards with mobility and used them to repeated blind the attacking stacks until my main army got back into town.

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I could see that. Since I have 3 Sun mana in my current game, all my mages have Blinding Light by default, so I probably overlooked the usefulness of the Radiant Guard. That is certainly a nice ability to have.

PS Anyone know if crown continues to do damage after you cast it if it hasn't faded? I noticed that it says there's a 25% chance of it fading each turn, but I haven't been able to tell if it does another pulse of damage on the turns where it hasn't faded yet.

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According to the manual (awesome job, by the way. Many, many thanks for putting this together!), Crown of Brilliance does damage each turn. I think I've seen it do just what the description says.

MagisterCultuum said:

The Empyrean really needs to be changed to better fit its theme, imho. It should be a religion of diplomacy, peace, and enlightenment.

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I'd love to see more in the religion that encouraged diplomacy, peace, and enlightenment. Even something small like negating the religion penalty with non-evil religions would be cool and thematic.

In my version, Chalid looses his unique spell and Empyrean Temples increase the GPP rate but hurt military production. I had made it so that their high priests could be sacrificed for a golden age, but now I'm thinking I may instead let them use Corindale's Peace spell (or maybe a weaker version thereof, which doesn't effect the whole world). (I'm doubling the number of priest spells for all religions)

I'm thinking I'll change Revelation to be a pyPerTurn effect for the Vicars instead of a spell, but I'm not sure what spell to give them instead. Maybe something similar to Inspiration, creating a temporary building that provides a small happiness/health/GPP/research/war weariness increase?

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Interesting. The Peace spell is incredibly powerful even as a one-time schtick, so I'd be hesitant to give it out to multiple units. If you make Revelation to a python call, won't that further hurt performance? I'm not a modder, so just curious.

Could give Empy priests only spells that help the city they're in -- like enlightenment.

My biggest complaint with Empyrean is how poorly its lore and gameplay value match up. It's supposed to be... well, what Magister said, but right now it's an amazing warmonger religion that's a no-brainer pick for all the Raider leaders except maybe Faeryl.

Radiant Guards and Rathas can blind the bulk of an army, permanently stonewalling a scary looking invasion force. If you're a Raider, they all can use enemy roads, which means you can take some Rathas, give one Sentry, have it scout out enemy land, find a mean looking stack, and mob it with the rest of the Rathas, blinding it. Then in the same turn they pull back onto a forested hill or god help the enemy, your own territory, and hide behind a swordsman or champion or something.

Then there's Chalid. Within 20 turns of sitting around or like 5 turns of active combat, he has combat 5 + mobility 1, giving him really strong spells, great survivability, and great speed. With Raider, he can hit a stack, then pull back to your own friendly stack. Or, have crown of brilliance active, pillar one enemy stack, then move next to a different enemy stack and end his turn. They take damage from crown next turn. Your army mops these stacks up.

That's mostly it, Empyrean gives Raiders an unstoppable, fast army and gives everyone else an unstoppable, slow army. The shrine and revelation are nice if you are dealing with the Doviello, Svartalfar or Sidar and need to screw them over for using invisibility or HN on you. Does revelation work in Nox Noctis lands now?

So, I don't really like Empyrean per se, but I think you really have to take a look at Chalid. He isn't just 'kinda' strong. He's a sun tanned wrecking ball of torment and destruction. If you get him up and running, you can do some amazing things.

That said, it's still kinda a long slow walk to Empyrean, so tread it carefully.

Schmoe said:

Interesting. The Peace spell is incredibly powerful even as a one-time schtick, so I'd be hesitant to give it out to multiple units.

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Well, it would be powerful, but High Priests aren't that easy to come by. I might decide to make them require a higher level it it is too strong, or I might just (as I said) use a nerfed version of Peace.


What if the spell had a delay and only worked on the owners of units in adjacent tiles? Or only worked in enemy territory, and only ended wars against the owner of said enemy territory? That way you'd have to put the caster in peril and would not get peace if the enemy manages to kill him first.


What if it ended random wars? It might make your enemies all make peace with you, or make peace with each other unite against you.

If you make Revelation to a python call, won't that further hurt performance? I'm not a modder, so just curious.

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Well, it would probably slow things down a little. It would have to run once per turn per Vicar, so its effect on the speed would depend on the number of Vicars present. If they were national units I'd say there would never be a reason to worry, but spamming priests could slow things down.

Hmm...I was just looking though the python code, and it looks like its prereq is almost as complex as the spell. The prereq would be unnecessary if it were changed to a pyPerTurn effect. I believe that the prereq code is run far more often than the pyPerTurn code (it has to be updated at least every time the unit moves), so making it passive might actually speed things up slightly, at least in some instances.

If I nerfed it so that it only effected the first eligible unit in a stack then things would almost certainly speed things up.

If it didn't have to kill illusions I could change it to a SDK/XML spell triggered by a single line of python (this is how Crown of Brillance works), which would make things much faster.






I'm kinda thinking that your team should not be immune to the effect. The Empyrean is a religion that would never condone deception, even from its followers and for a good cause.

Zechnophobe said:

So, I don't really like Empyrean per se, but I think you really have to take a look at Chalid. He isn't just 'kinda' strong. He's a sun tanned wrecking ball of torment and destruction. If you get him up and running, you can do some amazing things.

That said, it's still kinda a long slow walk to Empyrean, so tread it carefully.

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Yeah, I'm beginning to figure that out. I have Chalid and Teutorix walking around together, along with a couple of Archmagi to summon Aurealis. Considering I have 3 Sun mana (Sun affinity FTW!), I'm putting some serious hurt on Tasunke right about now.

Schmoe said:

Even compared to Meshabber of Dis? Heck, Mardero is stronger unless you have 3 Sun mana lying around, and why would you? I agree the combination Chalid offers is hard to beat, but I don't think he's clearly the best.

I just don't see much that's special about Empyrean. Chalid (admittedly very strong) is about it. There's stuff that is sort of thematically related, but nothing that makes me think "Oooh, so that's what I can do with it."

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Chalid is THE reason for going Emyprean. You can wipe out entire stacks with just him and a green army of axemen. Being able to take down an enemy stack of 20 champions from say. . . 8 strength down to 4 before your units engage in melee combat means you take 0 to 1 casualities instead of 5 or more.

Meshabber of Dis and the Mythril Golem are way overrated. You need 4000 hammers AND can only build the avatar in the holy city AND can only strike one or two targets per turn (IMO, the avatar units need to have their hammer build requirements lowered drastically). I'd much rather have 50 champions than an avatar.

And Hemah is only a shell of his former self without the meteor and crush spells.

Yes, do agree. I don't really like anything else about Empyrean. I don't ever bother building their priests or their guard units because Chalid is already enough usually to win wars.

If I had to pick between Rathas and Chalid I'd pick the Rathas. You can only have 1 Chalid; against a split army he doesn't look so great and god help you if you thought you could get away with just building a small conventional army to kill things Chalid turned into easy pickings.

Rathas can turn an attempt by all my neighbors to dogpile me into a sad joke. Their armies just sit there and cost maintenance while I build a counterattack force at my leisure. They work great together though, Chalid softens up one of the paralyzed stacks and my free army farms it for experience.

But yeah, Chalid's great for offensive wars, but sometimes you get the fight taken to you, then Rathas save your ass against armies that could go around Chalid and take a few cities of yours.

Vicars are horrible, but the high priests rocks. Put them with a few Rathas, it is rather sick. Blind + repeated crown of brilliance (note that the damage radius is only 1). Plus, since Chalid is so good at wearing down enemy stacks, your vicars get easy xps from picking off the heavily damaged units.

Empyrean is a far, far better religion for effective warmongering than Order, as Order just gives you more units/help you pay for the units without helping you win the war.

i have to underline what monkeyfinger said. until the AI learns to handle stacks with several immobilized units rathas are one of the strongest weapons available. they turn SoDs into heaps of waiting EP without any of the limitations mages have.

Not that it would help the AI much if it moved the non-blinded units forward, since that would just be breaking like a third of the stack away, making it even easier to pick apart.

Maybe we need a new spell for the AI: Flail Blindly. When stuck by Blinding Light, they can cast this to turn the entire stack into Pyre Zombies and suicide them on the spot

Well, we really need a spell that cures blind or charmed or entangled. Make it rare or having a chance to fail if necessary, but we need the AI to be able to cast this kind of "cure" or "dispel magic" so that their SoD can be competitive.

agreed... it's pretty lame to trick them like that :\